The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

you are seeing someone else’s dreams?”
    “No, that’s the thing, that’s their other distinction: it’s more precise to say that I’m dreaming someone else’s consciousness.”
    “Meaning?”
    “Um, how do I put it...it doesn’t look like a dream—more like a memory, a very vivid, visceral memory, with touch and smell—only I am absolutely certain that whatever is happening has never happened to
me
. I know it’s not
my
memory.”
    One undisputable advantage of living with a reporter is that with time, thanks to her extraordinary skill of patient questioning, she trains you to explain yourself with great coherence and in perfectly clear language, plus your vocabulary expands to such unprecedented levels that sometimes people think you’re the one who writes for a living. So, here’s the picture—stuck in my mindafter I dreamt it a least a dozen times: a forest in springtime, tree trunks spotted with sunlight, the smell of wet bark and sap, a very green smell, and the man walking in front of me is dressed in a gray-blue military uniform with a Schmeiser over his shoulder, only his belt is not made of leather, for some reason, but woven, with stitching. We are walking through the forest “goose-file”—somehow I know that’s what it’s called—and this sturdy peasant back, girded with its woven belt, is the last thing I see when a dry stutter explodes from behind the trees; something shoves me hard in the chest, and everything goes black. After that, I don’t remember anything—it’s gone like a piece of paper in dark water. A bit later, after she’d had a chance to confer with knowledgeable people—she knows more experts in various fields than the State Reference Library, all she has to do is pick up the phone—Lolly, excited as Sherlock Holmes on a case, reported that such woven, stitched belts do, in fact, exist, and have for quite a while—as part of the US Army uniform. You see, that’s what I mean—how would I ever know that?
    “Okay, what about that Schmeiser? Are you sure it was a Schmeiser?”
    “Absolutely, and the forest looked very much like our forests here, not the American woods, and more than that—in my dream, I knew what everything was called, not just the trees but even the bushes: thorn apple, heather, juniper.”
    “Well, that actually doesn’t surprise me at all—you could have picked those up somewhere, in passing, like when you went hiking with your mom when you were little, the time you climbed Goverla, and then just forgot...”
    “But by this logic, is it the same with the American uniform: I knew it once, then I forgot? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
    In response, Lolly arranged her face into one of her proprietary contortions: one lip thoughtfully pursed, brows scrunched together, eyes like a pair of tiny pointy horns—“the silence of the wolves” it’s called, when she runs out of arguments but doesn’t want to admit defeat (she also has “the silence of the lambs”—withbig, piteous eyes, when she’s begging for mercy)—and, of course, as always, I had to laugh and hug the little imp. But I also had to wonder: Heck, what if I
had
seen a uniform like that somewhere before, like on one of those shoddy posters in military prep classes? We’re all Cold War children after all, and those with technical education especially—all groomed to work for our dear ol’ military industrial complex, which, may it rest in peace—met such inglorious demise that I’m the last one of our class who still, at least on paper, counts in the ranks of our profession, although others never relied on it for their bread and butter, and it’s good they didn’t because it wouldn’t get you a single dry a crumb now. I’m lucky I liked playing with Uncle’s cigarette holders when I was a kid—who knew I’d start a business out of that, ha!—but I still remember the u-es-es-arr’s terrible military secrets, like the fact that the diameter of our noodles matched the caliber of our bullets, and that our cocoa factories were engineered to switch to manufacturing gunpowder in twenty-four hours, so why shouldn’t some rotten layer of my collective unconscious spit up a long-forgotten detail about those dirty imperialists we were so keen to fight?
    A logical explanation, to be sure, but I didn’t like it: it was inelegant. It lacked insight, an inspired suddenness of association that makes everything click together like pieces of a puzzle, with no